Category Archives: Performance review – miscellaneous

Eden

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Last night Joyce DiDonato and il Pomo d’Oro brought their touring show Eden to Koerner Hall.  It’s one of those genre defying shows that’s not especially easy to describe.  Basically it’s a recital of art songs and arias; most of the latter from the 18th century, with chamber orchestra accompaniment.  It’s also staged but not with any obvious narrative.  Rather Joyce interacts with two very large metal hoops which move around and rotate on their axes.  All of this is backed up by John Torres’ complex and sometimes spectacular lighting plot.  Cynics might call it gimmicky but given the difficulty of building the audience for vocal recitals I’m all for trying new things and the audience loved it so I think that’s justification enough.

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A Simple Twist of Fate

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Confluence Concerts returned to live performance last night at Heliconian Hall.  The concert, curated by Patricia O’Callaghan, was titled A Simple Twist of Fate and featured an eclectic mix of music either on the topic of Fate or that was entwined with the fates of the performers.

Confluence_ConcertImages_2021_Fate_Banner

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The nightingale flies from its gilded cage

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nightingale1Florence: The Lady with the Lamp, music by Timothy Sullivan, libretto by Anne Mcpherson, premiered at the Elora Festival in 1992 and n 1995 was the first Canadian work performed by VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert.  Yesterday afternoon they presented it again at the St. Lawrence Centre; staged and with orchestra.

It’s an interesting piece.  Some of it I liked a lot and some not so much.  The orchestral writing is excellent; colourful and atmospheric with some jazz influences.  I quite often found myself drifting off into listening to the orchestra when perhaps I should have paid more attention to the words, especially as there were no surtitles.  The vocal writing is less interesting but it had its moments especially in some of the ensembles.  It’s the old dilemma of whether or not to prioritise the comprehensibility of the words over strictly musical values. Continue reading →

The Lion Heart

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lionheartThe Lion Heart is a new opera by Corey Arnold and Kyle McDonald.  Their aim, as described in an interview on barczablog, was to create an opera that was more accessible to modern audiences than “most modern opera”.  I’m not sure how much “modern opera” they have actually seen/heard but what they seem to mean by accessible is a heavily scored neo-Romanticism supporting a through sung vocal line with nothing much in the way of an aria or any way for their singers to display their chops but we’ll come back to that. Continue reading →

Gloria

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Brandon Jacobs-Jenkjins’ play Gloria, directed by André Sills is currently playing at Crow’s Theatre.  It’s a hard play to describe as spoilers must be avoided and it works at many different levels.  The initial setting is the offices of a New York “culture” magazine where we meet various members of the highly dysfunctional workforce.  A shocking event happens and the rest of the play explores how various parts of the media industries relate to such events in the internet age along with issues related to who really “owns” an experience and in what sense does that “ownership” validate or privilege their version of events versus any other.  One of the ideas here is that the “product” has become in every way secondary.  The magazine is little more than a prop for blog posts.  Book publishing is largely geared around selling the movie or TV rights.  Movie and TV production is largely about providing a package for prefabricated celebrities to feature in.  The irony of a print and internet reviewer writing about all this is not lost on me!

athena kaitlin trinh and Nabil Traboulsi in GLORIA_photo by Jeremy Mimnagh

athena kaitlin trinh and Nabil Traboulsi

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Stewart Goodyear at Koerner

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Yes, a real live concert at Koerner Hall; the first of 2022.  Owing to the current restrictions it was quite a short concert with no interval (although the time it took the stage crew to set up for the second half there could have been!).  The first piece was the premier of Goodyear’s Piano Quintet.  It’s a very complex piece riffing off Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  Stewart describes it better than I ever could:

“My piano quintet was commissioned by the Penderecki String Quartet (who played it with Stewart last night – JG) and the Canada Council for the Arts. It was composed in 2020 and pays homage to the spirit of Beethoven. The first movement is a passacaglia on the almost atonal eleven-note sequence from the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The second movement is a Ländler, fused with gestures of rhythm and blues and calypso. The third movement is a fast toccata, sampling themes of Beethoven similarly to a hip-hop track. The last movement starts as a lament and ends with a glimmer of hope, the inspiration directly taken from the challenges of the pandemic and the need for Beethoven’s spirit during these tumultuous times.”

It’s a highly virtuosic piece requiring a lot of extended technique from the players and it’s pretty demanding on the listener.  I would need to listen to it a couple more times to really “get” it.

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